To lose a part of your life is to bleed and burn
On feeling adrift and failing to find my place in the world
I was a powerhouse, a force to be reckoned with. I was ambitious and a mad multi-disciplinary. My thoughts, they didn’t just come and go, they came to stay and amuse. I was a natural. Now, I’m not sure who I am.
Every day, I am haunted by these horrifying voices in my head, reinforcing how little I have become. It is a continuous battle that renders me defeated each chance it gets. Like everyone, I always knew a day would come when I would eventually lose my spark. I just didn’t know it would be this soon.
It doesn’t hurt that I lost my spark when I haven’t proven myself to the world. It hurts most that it happened when I haven’t even proven anything to myself yet.
Poor choices
Throughout the four long years I spent in college, I made far too many choices that have come out dry. Rather than pursuing internships, I sought out memberships in organizations. I spent more of my time proposing and spearheading projects than I did gaining experience in my field to advance my career.
In fact, I think I might have done too much than one can handle.
Instead of doing a 3-month on-the-job training (OJT), I only did a week of it and the rest campaigning for my bets in the 2022 national elections (and still got my OJT completion certificate). I’m not going to lie, I always thought my experience and the skills I gained from all these would later serve me best when it came to my professional career. They didn’t, or maybe not yet.
A few months before my graduation in October 2022, I was already struggling to regain my confidence. I blamed my poor choices for it. I lost my structure and routine, and my life is now in turmoil. I am the dark in the deep, trying to find my way to the surface, surging deeply into unfamiliar territory.
A year later, I find myself still feeling adrift and unsure of my place in the world.
When I graduated, I didn’t have a normal and generic reaction. It was supposed to make me feel like I was free at last from the shackles of expectations from my people. It was meant to bring me joy. But, while the rest were celebrating in jubilance, I was mourning.
I didn’t just go astray; I died that day.
My time might not come
I would sometimes convince myself that this is just a phase everyone goes through, a phase where they feel lost in life yet confident with time ahead, buried in obscurity yet exposed to a stack of choices.
As for me, I was already lost in life the moment I lost my confidence, buried in obscurity with no choices to compensate for it.
“It’s valid and normal to feel that way,” I’m told every day, and I’m sure it is. I have known that for quite a long time. But what I need to hear are comforting words on how to break free. People I know have coped with it; they were able to navigate through, get back on track, and move on with their lives, thriving and unscathed. I ask, and they tell me, “Life’s not a race, your time will come.” “And in the interim?” I raise. “Take the time to figure out what you want to do next.”
I was met with vague and cliche answers that haven’t done me any good in the past few months. It’s easy to say one’s time will come. “But what if it won’t?” We’re suddenly at a loss for words, and all we’re left to say is the most predictable and trite statement: It always will.
What gets me every time, though, is not how obscure my future holds but how I’ve come to lose faith in myself. Before, when someone would ask me something, my brain would immediately toil like a calculator, generating pointers to what I should say next and continuing to expand on them as I went on. Finding the right words in a split second was never foreign to me. I would often think of myself as a natural.
How quickly the tables have turned.
I always wanted to be different, but I did not mean this kind of ‘different.’ I turned out to be the worst of my form.
My hands can bear witness to how distinct and meaningful turns of phrases get written at a glance with ease. But the words it used to be acquainted with have become remote, seemingly inaccessible. It would now take me hours to finish a paragraph in my journal because I overthink how unappealing it would sound if I read it back. When I applied for jobs, I would end up rejecting their interview offers for fear of messing it up. I would text them how unfair it would be to me and the interviewer to appear unprepared as I wasn’t in the right headspace. Among the two potential employers that I said this to, I never got any response or acknowledgment. I don’t blame them.
After all, no matter how hard I try to persuade myself to finally become a useful member of society, I still cannot, for the sake of me, convince my mind that I can. I am just not ready yet.
Becoming me…again
Google and I sense that how and what I’m feeling, this utter misery, is a symptom of depression, and I fear that it might be. I also fear that when I seek professional help and finally come through, I will be asked in an interview if I have been diagnosed with mental illness, and that saying yes might screw up my one chance of getting the role. But I also fear that if I do not seek the help I need, my situation may aggressively progress, and I might nonetheless end up screwing my chance of getting any role. It is a constant battle I face as I end my days — one that I am not ready to face and one that I am unsure if I will ever be ready to.
My dear reader, you may have made it to this part of my story thinking you can finally find an easy way out of the situation we’ve both caught ourselves in. But I am now coming forward to admit that I only wrote this intending to find out what next steps I should take once I structure my circumstances and thoughts in writing. But after spending a couple of hours writing this last paragraph, nothing came to mind. Perhaps, like others, I should just accept that I am not through with this phase and that my time has yet to come. Maybe then will I come back with the part of me that died that day, still promising and full of life.
My efforts to ameliorate my situation will not go unnoticed, and, while late, I still have the rest of my youth to make up for that part of my life that was once lost.
It might require more strength and grit than someone like me will ever know, but I will continue to thrive on my unexploited optimism for that time to hopefully come sooner.
Because what if it won’t?
